10 Tips for iWeb users

1. HTML snippet

Although iWeb is designed to be a easy to use app to create personal and small sites for organizations, it has the ability to be much more than the built-in templates by giving you the ability to put in HTML snippets. This is great when you want to embed a video on your site from another site or some other widget from a different site. Just go to your Widgets tab and drag the HTML Snippet onto your page where you want the content to appear and then paste in the HTML embed code that you copied.

2. FTP

When iWeb first came out the only hosting service that you could upload to directly was .mac (MobileMe), now iWeb lets you upload to any hosting company via FTP. This is GREAT!

3. YouTube 16×9

Although there is an existing YouTube snippet I prefer using the HTML Snippet instead because it allows me to keep the movie in widescreen mode (16:9) by using the YouTube embed code instead of the URL in the YouTube widget (which is 4:3 aspect).

4. Update Facebook

If you're a Facebook user you can iWeb automatically post to your wall that you've updated your website. Just check the box on Site Publishing Settings page.

5. Design your own page

Although the templates are nice, you can start with a blank page and design it anyway you want with your own images, snippets and text. Just add a Blank page to your site and go to town.

6. Use a MobileMe Gallery

iWeb does a great job in allowing you to build photo pages right in the app itself. However, if you're already publishing your photos up to MobileMe, there's no reason to reinvent the wheel and to have to keep to sites updated. Just drag the MobileMe Widget onto your page and choose the gallery you want to use from the popup.

7. Edit on another Mac

iWeb is designed to use only on one Mac. Although you can certainly have iLife installed on multiple Macs, you iWeb sites actually are contained in a special file. In order to edit your sites on a different Mac you'll need to copy the "Domain" file located in your User Folder->Library->Application Support->iWeb folder. The Domain file contains all of your sites and work that you've done.

8. Multiple sites

You can create as many iWeb sites as you want. The key is that each site has to have a different name especially if you're going to publish them to the same service (ie MobileMe). To Create a New Site choose New Site from the File menu. Pick whichever template you want and then change the name in the Publish Site Settings as well as choose which way you want to publish the site.

9. Get more templates

The iWeb templates feature is what really makes iWeb so easy to use. However, if everyone uses the same templates then all of our sites will start to look alike. So go get some more templates. Here's a site that has some.

10. Add an RSS feed

If you want to include feeds from sites outside of iWeb you can easily add them to your pages via the RSS feed widget. For example, my blog is a WordPress blog because I needed more power than what iWeb offers. However, it's nice to have my most recent articles appear directly on my website via the RSS widget.

11 Responses to 10 Tips for iWeb users

Excellent tips. I could have used this about 6 weeks ago when I took a developing iWeb site from MobileMe to hosting it at a different site using FTP. Definitely thanks for sharing the additional themes! The web site listed in the posting is my site I created using iWeb and publishing to a hosted site.

I have to admit that I gave up on iWeb and went for RapidWeaver instead. The support community has already been worth it, and RapidWeaver was part of the recent MacHeist bundle which made it an excellent value. (It already is!)

There are also a lot of plugins for RapidWeaver that turn the awesome knob to 11.

I used to use iWeb but the code is horrific and I depend on getting good search results for my site. So I used an XHTML template. However, with all this stuff about HTML 5 and the iPad, does anyone know if iWeb will eventually code with HTML 5 and the code won’t be ugly and huge with a bunch of everywhere? I want to start changing my site to HTML 5 but if iWeb comes out with it using the new code, I want to get it and save months of work. Help a sister out…anyone.

Hey it’s me again. No one has answered my question. I called Apple and no word on a new iWeb with html5. Can someone with an iPad check and see if they can view my videos on my site. I heard that only html5 video is seen. Let me know someone, pleeeezzz. My site is http://muralsandfauxpainting.com : )

Apple will never say whether iWeb will support HTML5 or when the new version will come out. It’s not their style. However, Apple has been so busy with their cloud updates that I expect very big things for anything that works with MobileMe in 2011.

If I had to guess, I would say an HTML5 version of iWeb will be out with a new iLife version by early next year. I am in the same dilemma as you and I’ve just resolved to create my site with the current version and just redo it when the new version comes out. It’s easy enough as compared to coding the damn thing.

As a new iWeb user looking for some tips these were helpful. A couple of the comments above about using Rapidweaver and the xhtml and HTML5 concerns make me a little worried about my choice now though. Off to do some more research and check some more code. Keep up the posting here.

Unbelievable that after shelling out over $1200 for a new Mac with iWork (w/ pages ’09) that I still have to use Word 2008 for Mac to have any real control over the appearance of my webpages. I will use Word and “save as webpage” and “insert hyperlink” to get menus from one page to the next. Why can’t they make Pages do that? They brag about the layout powers but don’t let me use those great designs for my webpage. Of course iweb is horribly constrained by the templates. How does someone with almost no computer skills make a nice website? I remember doing it with MS Word on a school webpage years ago, and I had the best webpage in the school just doing it that way, with pics and links and text, , just use colors for background, and it looked great with full control to put as much/little text and links as I wanted.